The fate of Turkey and liberal values

Is there any better example of the foolishness and dishonesty of secular democracy without a commitment to liberal values, a commitment to liberty, than the on-going developments in Turkey?

Turkey charges 86 for 'coup plot'

"On Monday prosecutor Mr Engin filed charges at an Istanbul court against 86 people, 48 of whom are already in custody.

'The indictment covers crimes such as forming an armed terror group...and attempting to overthrow the government by force,' Mr Engin said.

A court must decide within two weeks whether to open the case against the 86 suspects.

They are accused of plotting to create chaos in Turkey, provoking secularist anger and a military coup that would topple the government.

The indictment referred to the killing of a judge in a 2006 armed attack on a court, and the bombing of a secularist newspaper.

There have been several coups by the Turkish military, which sees itself as the ultimate guardian of the country's secular values.

Some secularists believe the AK Party, many of whose members are former Islamists, is intent on installing Islamism in Turkey. They say the AKP's moves to overturn a ban on the Islamic headscarf at universities is evidence of this."

Future of the Ruling AK Party

"Turkey's recent top court decision that rejected a parliament constitutional amendment, which would have allowed female students to attend universities with headscarves, has provoked thousands of Turkish women, AKP supporters, and human rights activists worldwide.

It has also triggered an intense debate over the future of both: The ruling AKP — facing a constitutional court closure case in a few months— and Turkey's unique secularism seen by many critics as anti-democratic and anti-liberal.

The ruling Justice and Development party, AKP, rejected the decision as unconstitutional, breaching individual freedoms, and politically motivated. The court's decision poses a real threat to the majority party that is awaiting another constitutional court case seeking to outlaw the party and its 71 leaders—including the president Abdullah Gul and charismatic Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan— on grounds they are working to undermine the country's entrenched secularism."


Free speech on trial in Turkey

"Like one of his own characters, trapped between liberal yearnings and the reality of an unforgiving state, Turkey's most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk, is slated to appear in court Friday to face charges of 'insulting Turkish identity.'

The high-profile free speech trial pits the aims of European-driven reform in Turkey - which began EU membership talks last October - against a fiercely nationalistic tradition that permits little challenge. Mr. Pamuk's trial is one of more than 65 other free speech cases now under way in Turkey, which are being closely watched by European observers, as a test of the recent reforms.

'This is a tug of war in Turkey now, between those who favor democratic and EU values, [against] those who are afraid of such change - the hard-core nationalists who are willing to do anything to stop that trend,' says Haluk Sahin, a journalism professor at Bilgi University and columnist for Radikal newspaper, who is also facing trial in February under the same statute...

Pamuk is charged over remarks made to a Swiss newspaper last February, that '30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.'

Pamuk did not use the word 'genocide,' which is officially rejected here in favor of an 'internecine fighting' formulation to explain the Armenian deaths 90 years ago. Western historians, however, often consider the events in Anatolia during the last years of the Ottoman Empire to be the first genocide of the 20th century.

Turkey has also long had difficulty accepting that Kurds have a separate ethnic identity, with their own language and customs, beyond a designation as 'Mountain Turks.' Battle against separatist Kurds in the 1980s and 1990s left an estimated 30,000 Kurds dead.

Even discussing such issues has been taboo in Turkey, though freedom of speech protection is required to join the EU club. Extremists rallied against Pamuk; a provincial governor ordered his books burned.

'Various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me, with some right-wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I should be 'silenced' for good,' Pamuk writes in the current issue of The New Yorker magazine. 'What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats?' he asks...

Pamuk faces three years in prison if convicted, though often such cases end in payment of fines.

Still, the number of cases is mounting, bringing opprobrium from the US and Europe - which has expressed 'serious concern' and tasked an envoy with following the trial - as well as from human rights organizations.

'The trial of Orhan Pamuk will show the world which direction Turkish justice is heading,' Holly Cartner, the Europe and Central Asia director of Human Rights Watch said in a statement."

Turkish High Court Overturns Headscarf Rule
[notice how the left-wing, secular New York Times refers to the right to wear Muslim headscarves as a rule rather than as a freedom]

"ISTANBUL — Turkey’s highest court dealt a stinging slap to the governing party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday, ruling that a legal change allowing women attending universities to wear head scarves was unconstitutional.

Turkish women wearing head scarves walked through the streets of Istanbul. Turkey's top court ruled today that Islamic head scarves violate secularism and cannot be allowed at universities.

The Constitutional Court said in a brief statement that the change, proposed by Mr. Erdogan’s party and passed by Parliament in February, violated principles of secularism set in Turkey’s Constitution.

The ruling sets the stage for a showdown between Turkey’s secular elite — its military, judiciary and secular political party — and Mr. Erdogan, an observant Muslim with an Islamist past.

The court is one of Turkey’s most important secular institutions, and liberals see the ruling as largely political. It bodes ominously for Mr. Erdogan: The same court is considering a case that would ban him and 70 members of his party from politics. A decision is expected in the summer.

Turkey’s political system has been controlled for generations by a powerful secular elite that has stepped in with coups and judicial decisions against elected governments. Mr. Erdogan and his party, Justice and Development, or AKP, have come the closest of any political party in Turkey’s history to breaking its hold on power.

In the head-scarf case, the elite establishment contended that allowing veiled women onto campuses threatened Turkish secularism, one of the founding principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secular revolution in the 1920s. Head scarves were banned from campuses in the 1990s.

Kemal Anadol, a deputy chairman of the secular opposition Republican People’s Party, called the verdict a triumph of justice and said it showed that secularism and democracy were 'constitutional principles that can’t be separated from one another.'

Mr. Erdogan calls the case a matter of individual rights, contending that all Turks should be able to attend universities no matter what they wear or believe.

But the way his party proposed it — abruptly, with little public discussion — angered the secular old guard and disappointed liberals, who support the changes, but want them to be accompanied by changes that strengthen other rights, like free speech. Some said AKP seemed to be pursuing only those changes that would please its constituency, and not the broader range that was needed to join the European Union.

'AKP is lost in the spell of their own power,' said Mithat Sancar, a law professor in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. 'When they want to listen to liberals, they do, but when they don’t, they comfortably ignore them.'

Despite Mr. Erdogan’s broad popularity — his party won 47 percent of the vote in an election last July — the threat of a ban is serious. The authorities have closed more than 20 parties in the past, and Thursday’s ruling seemed as if it could be a sign of things to come.

The head-scarf amendment is considered to be the single most important irritant that set off the case to ban Mr. Erdogan and 70 other AKP members, and it is central to the prosecution’s argument that he and his allies are trying to dismantle secularism in Turkey, an accusation they strongly dispute."

Secular military coups. Banning religious parties. Censoring speech about Armenian genocide. Prohibiting religious headscarves.

How on earth could such leftism ever be characterized as liberal, in any honest sense?

The answer is that it cannot. And Turkey, today, reflects the sham of left-wing power grabs as liberal in any substantive sense.

Liberal means liberty. Power is the opposite of liberty. When people claim power on behalf of freedom without presumption against its use they do not bring a honest commitment to liberal values. They are rationalizing power for the causes they favor. Hence the most important aphorism in the political world by a more genuine liberal, John Dalberg-Acton:

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Power is not freedom. Freedom is not power. They are opposites, even when power is used legitimately. Which is why we need a presumption against its use if we are to maintain any honest notion of liberal democracy.

Laziness, comfort, and a bit of wisdom

Given my slothful nature this summer, I looked for quotations on the corrupting nature of comfort and laziness. I spent a good hour in idle reflection on the brief witicisms of dead men. It didn't cure my indolence. But it gave me plenty excuse to put off actual work.

"I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction"

"Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power."

"In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love."

"This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual."

"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise,
I say ignore the bastard."

John Steinbeck (American Novelist and Writer, Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962, 1902-1968)


"The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish."

"Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought."

"Radical changes in world politics leave America with a heightened responsibility to be, for the world, an example of a genuinely free, democratic, just and humane society."

"Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes."

"Love is never defeated, and I could add, the history of Ireland proves it."

"Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn't misuse it."

Pope John Paul II (264th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, 1920-2005)


"It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?"

"The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away."

"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."

"Coersion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him."

"I know in my heart that man is good.
That what is right will always eventually triumph.
And there's purpose and worth to each and every life."

Ronald Reagan (40th President of the United States, 1911-2004)


As always, Twain steals the show.

"I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility."

"Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. It is a trait that is not known to the higher animals."

"It is curious--curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare."

"The insincerity of man--all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet--his fame is eternal--needs no genius, no talent--mere honesty--Luther, Christ, etc."

"After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her."

"A man will do anything, no matter what it is, to secure his spiritual comfort; and he can neither be forced nor persuaded to any act which has not that goal for its object."

Mark Twain (American humorist and writer, 1835-1910)


I wish I could say that idleness produces wisdom. It probably does, but it also adds weight and a healthy skepticism of all things done in a hurry. But, mostly, it keeps me honest about my true ambitions. Never hurts to be too honest.

Stubborn certainty and more stubborn facts

It's so funny to me that those pressuring Iran to give up the bomb, right now, cannot even conceive that their approach might be the exact problem that has created the stalemate.

Jitters Over Iran

But here's the trick when it comes to a false sense of "certainty." Facts are more stubborn than our insecurities about the world. They are more stubborn than our need for certainty that we do not have. And the fact of the failure of this approach for handling the nuclear standoff with Iran will persist completely independent of our stubborn attachment to failed policy.

Facts of human nature don't give two shits what your opinion is of them. And the fact that backing Iran into a corner makes them more aggressive will persist until the Administration, the United Nations, and the Israeli leadership face up to their failure. Which may be a long time coming, at this point.

The fact that existentially threatening Israel has not resolved Ahmadinejad's hateful and irrational conflicts with her neighbor has clearly not occurred to the Iranian President either. But I take the irrational leadership of Iran as a given and work on the party who has a shot at being a bit more wise about their policies.

Perhaps none of these parties are capable of reasonable consideration of policy options, including considering options that leave them with lots of egg on their faces but has a better shot at getting the job done.

Facts don't give two shits how stubbornly you are attached to any particular way of doing things. And neither do I.

And a false sense of certainty does not replace more genuine understanding of the situation in front of you in a hundred years.

Some people can only learn such lessons the hard way, I am learning.

So be it.

But, this time, be a grown-up and take responsibility for your fuck up.

Or leave leadership to people who can.

The antidote to cynicism

Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields understands, even if Ron Wood does not.



As does Peter Gabriel, in this gorgeous and melodic cover.



How sad that anyone would settle for less.

Lifestyles of the rich and cynical

I've always said that the saddest consequence of cynicism, in life, is that, generally, it means that you miss out on real love in your life.

Ron Wood, 61, Runs Off With 18-Year-Old Cocktail Waitress

If there is any more proof needed of what a fool this guy is, I don't know what it would be.

I watched a video of Nora Jones and Keith Richards singing a duo of Love Hurts, recently. And all I kept thinking was how Nora Jones so completely outclassed her wealthier, more famous Stones compatriot.



I love the Rolling Stones, is the truth. I love rocking out and the dark and exciting themes in songs like Paint It Black, Sympathy with the Devil, Start Me Up, Brown Sugar, Wild Horses, Shattered, Get Off of My Cloud, Heart of Stone, (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, Jumpin' Jack Flash, and the poignant and wildly ironic - given the tragic and foolish lives of most of the members of the Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want.



I would feel more sorry for this guys, is the truth, if they didn't consistently make messes out of their lives and the lives of those around them, and taking very little responsibility in the process.

But the commercial success of the Rolling Stones has always stuck out in my head as one of the better bits of evidence for those making the cynical argument for their lives and for life, generally, that nice guys finish last, to the victor goes the spoils, and every other cynical notion that people, especially young people of my generation and younger generations, have about the world.

But then you see a story like this one and you remember that, as always, the fantasy never lives up to the reality.

Cynisism is a foolish way to live one's life on any count, is the truth.

But cynicism about matters of love is one of its most tragic forms, I think. People who live their lives carrying such cynicism around in their hearts, whether flitting about from parter to partner or secretly harboring cynicism in committed relationships, make what I regard as one of the most serious mistakes that any person can make in a lifetime.

Because such cynicism cheats you from real love. And if you have never experienced it, you really have no clue what it is that you are missing out on. And there is no other thing in life that nurtures the heart and soul in quite the same way.

It is so sad to me that there are people in this world some of whom may never know what real love feels like. Not from their parents. Not from their family. Not from their friends. Not even from their lovers or spouses.

I can't imagine living a life so empty and tragic.

Ron Wood can (the rest of the band, too, save for more grounded members like Stones drummer, Charlie Watts). And I can't imagine a better argument for what a sad and bankrupt life it is to live like that. To live without real love. For others or for yourself. No matter how much money or fame or whatever cynical compensation for what really matters in life might be rationalized.



I'll take something real any day of the week. And none of that bullshit makes up for a hollow life without real love.

Does anyone believe in free speech anymore?

Looks like it's not just Democrats who have a problem with free speech.



They could have been much harsher with her, you know. Just remember what happened to Ahmad Bhatebe, Carol Kreck, and count yourself lucky. You wanna inhale excrement? Then pay the fuckin' ticket and do what your told.

You gotta love that logic. Take that, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We're America, bitch. We do what we want.

"I know their sacrifice was not for nothing. It was not in vain."

Hotair alerts me to this BBC report that the bodies of two U.S. servicemen, who came up missing during an ambush immediately after the surge began, have been found.

"Spc Alex Jimenez and Pte Byron Fouty had been listed as missing since they were seized in an ambush in May 2007 in an area south of Baghdad.

The body of a third soldier, Pte Joseph Anzack Jr, was found in the Euphrates river a short time after the attack.

The Islamic State of Iraq, a group that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, had released a video saying it killed all three men...

Pte Fouty's stepfather, Gordon Dibler, said the military told him the remains of both soldiers were found in the village of Jurf as Sakhr, south of Baghdad, Associated Press news agency reported.

Spc Jimenez's father, Ramon, told AP that the news had 'shattered all hope' the family had to 'see Alex walk home on his own'.

'Byron went to Iraq to help people who couldn't help themselves,' said Mr Dibler. 'I know their sacrifice was not for nothing. It was not in vain.'"

Rest in peace, boys. We honor your sacrafice.

Change we can believe in?

Hotair has the story about House and Senate Democrats trying to regulate speech by legislators' in forums like Youtube and blogs.

Thadeus McCotter (R-MI), to his credit, decided to answer with a video.



Is limiting free speech really change Democrats can believe in?

Maybe Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein need to embrace change we can all believe in and honestly debate and discuss with colleagues with whom they don't always see eye to eye.

Isn't that the whole point?

As the great Linda Richman might say:

"The branches of Congress are a deliber-a-tive chamba' fa the expression of often strawng disawgreement about impo-tant matta's of public paw-licy. Discuss amongst ya'selves."

What courage looks like

Ahmad Batebi, the 21-year-old student who was imprisoned and tortured by the Iranian government because this picture was featured on the cover of the Economist, has escaped to America.

Silent no more

For every thug, the world over, from America to North Korea to Zimbabwe to Iran, in every nation from every corner of the globe, who has rationalized their cowardice in the name of power, Ahmad Batebi is a living example and challenge to you of what courage really looks like.

Ahmad Batebi, now 30, was a student photographer attending a rare and brave student protest of the Iranian government in 1999 in Tehran. Amidst the protests and subsequent government crackdowns, Ahmad held up a bloody shirt presumably belonging to another student protestor who had been attacked, he claimed, by Basij paramilitary forces.

As a consequence of the international notoriety he experienced from that Economist cover photo, Batebi was sentenced to death by the Iranian government.

I want every thug who thinks that their machinations for power and brutality are novel or clever or otherwise respectable to take notice of the subsequent move by the Iranian government in response to the negative international publicity.

The government commuted his sentence for "creating street unrest" to 15 years.

Isn't that clever? You see, they weren't quite as tough or harsh as they might have been. They could have been so much tougher or harsher, you see. But, instead, they showed mercy on young Ahmad. And they only sentenced him to 15 years in prison for holding up that T-shirt.

As the Economist reports:

"During his interrogation he was blindfolded and beaten with cables until he passed out. His captors rubbed salt into his wounds to wake him up, so they could torture him more. They held his head in a drain full of sewage until he inhaled it. He recalls yearning for a swift death to end the pain. He was played recordings of what he was told was his mother being tortured. His captors wanted him to betray his fellow students, to implicate them in various crimes and to say on television that the blood on that T-shirt was only red paint. He says he refused.

He was sentenced to death for 'creating street unrest'. But after a global outcry, the sentence was commuted to 15 years in jail. He speculates that his high profile made it hard to kill him without attracting negative publicity. For two years, he was kept in solitary confinement, in a cell that was little more than a toilet hole with a wooden board on top. He was tortured constantly. Only when he was allowed to mingle with other prisoners again did he begin to overcome his despair.

He suffered a partial stroke that left the right side of his body without feeling. He needed medical attention. The regime did not want to be blamed for him dying behind bars, he says, so he was allowed out for treatment. Three months ago, on the day of the Persian new year, he escaped into Iraq. On June 24th he arrived in America."



I want every thug in America and across the globe to take stock of the ugly rationalization used by this government. Because it is the excuse used the world over to rationalize every power-hungry, vindictive, brutal, ugly impulse that has ever been callously indulged the world over, since the beginning of humanity. It is the source of humanity's ugliest rationalizations of its most ruthless, barbarous, vengeful inclinations since the beginning of its long recorded and unrecorded history. It is humanity's cruelest, most heartless, most sadistic and inhumane rationalization since its inception.

And those who rationalize such brutality, cruelty, and power-hunger in liberal societies are no better, in the largest picture, than these blood-thirsty mullahs, no matter what excuse they may offer.

Courage is not the impulse to impose such cruelty. Courage is the capacity to withstand such treatment, to come away alive undiscouraged, and perhaps emotionally stronger, for the experience, and for stronger values and ideas to prevail over their weaker, more cowardly, and more brutal brethren.

It does not take courage to inflict such treatment on people. It does not take courage to repress. It takes courage to stand up to such repression. And Ahmad Batebi's long, brutal journey is a testament to that kind of courage.

People have rationalized such ugliness since the beginning of humanity. It is the answer to the long-standing question of how humanity could have spent so much of its history in illiberal, undemocratic, and brutal and repressive conditions.

Because such illiberality, brutality, and repression was rationalized by societies, democratic and undemocratic, to cover for their cowardly, power-hungry, vindictive, and brutal ways. It is the same impulses that have rationalized every uncivilized, barbarous, cruel, mean-spirited, and cowardly policy that has ever made its presence on Earth. It is the same rationalization used by the Nazis. It is the same rationalization used by the Soviets. It is the same rationalization used by the Saddam Hussein. It is the same rationalization used by the Communists in Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and China.

It is the same rationalization that has been used since the beginning of human history for force as a governing philosophy, for repression and brutality as the only means of containing those same impulses rationalized to govern them.

I want to say that again and be very clear.

The exact impulses that are rationalized to contain such brutality are the ones being used to rationalize force as a governing philosophy for such containment. Force, so the excuse goes, is the only impulse that can control such brutality. There is truth to the idea that force must be used to confront brutality when no other options exist. But its unending abuse is why liberal societies need a committed presumption against such ugliness when it comes to the use of force, the least necessary force or aggression possible. Because that fact of life is also, now and forever, the source of the corruption to which power tempts into perpetuity.

And it is that temptation that America and the liberal democratic world is giving into, during this political moment.

Courage is what it looks like for people like Ahmad Batebi to challenge such rationalizations and corruption from power, openly and despite punishments or rewards, not because of them. Cowardice is what it looks like to engage in such rationalizations and fail to take responsibility for them and our behavior in accordance with those rationalizations.

If Americans need someone to look to as an example of what courage looks like, it is not found, in its strongest form, at this moment, in any our candidates for President or in almost any of our elected leaders.

Courage is found in this one very brave Iranian young man who stood up for freedom when others were cowered by power.

For Ahmad and the thousands of brave young protesters like him, thank you for your courage. It is a light amidst the dark canvass of power and repression the world over. Thank you for being that light.

Montesquieu in action

"Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. Is it not strange, though true, to say that virtue itself has need of limits?

To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power. A government may be so constituted, as no man shall be compelled to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to abstain from things which the law permits."

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1952, Book XI, Of the Laws Which Establish Political Liberty, with Regard to the Constitution

You think ideas don't make the world go round? Keep watching this Karl Rove testimony drama. It's Montesquieu and separation of powers in action.

Here's Karl Rove addressing the subpoena when it was issued.



Here's Debbie Wasserman Shultz threatening action from Congress.



And here's Catherine Crier, talking as a surrogate for John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, about arresting Karl Rove and trying him before Congress if he refuses to testify to the House.



But here's the funny part. Karl's right. This is resolved either by the consent of both parties, or it goes to the court.

Catherine Crier is right that Congress is a check on executive power. But Karl Rove is also right that the executive branch is a check on Congress, as well. Meaning, they both serve as checks on each others' power. Tie goes to the court, likely the Supreme Court, who will probably render a final decision on this question.

It's so funny watching so many people talk about the rule of law with so much certainty but with so little understanding of the rule of law, on this question, isn't it? Makes you wonder about the folks making such calls. If you haven't already had much reason to wonder, already.

The rule of law, like any idea, is subject to the whims and vagaries of politics and the obsession with power that it often entails. The Nuremberg Laws, in Germany, that compelled Jews to turn themselves into the state to be murdered, and Fugitive Slave Laws, in the United States, which required that Americans betray their consciences and turn in runaway slaves, are excellent examples of the rule of law being used to serve the purposes of those obsessed with power at the expense of conscience and morality. It has been used for such purposes since the beginning of humanity. That is why Montesquieu developed the idea of separation of powers, to check this tendency (not to eliminate it, which is impossible). In fact, it has repeatedly been used and abused in exactly this way during this political period, by both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.

But the ideas of people like the Baron de Montesquieu, embodied in the U.S. Constitution, ultimately govern this question.

And thank goodness for that. Without such ideas, we would all be subject to the vagaries of power that despotic governments that Montesquieu was critiquing were wont to engage in. We are subject to those vagaries, now, in liberal societies, as well.

But it is our liberal values and the ideas they give birth to, not the rule of law, that ultimately correct for such vagaries.

If you doubt that, keep watching. There's still a lot of life to be lived.

Involuntary volunteerism

Jonah Goldberg echoes my concerns about compulsory voluntarism (is it possible for an idea to be more internally contradictory?) and intrusive and expensive welfare states and their impact on genuine and voluntary contributions of money and service.

Forced servitude in America

"It's funny that, when the right seeks to use the government to impose its values, the left screams about brainwashing and propaganda. When the left tries it, the right thunders about social engineering. But when left and right agree -- as seems to be the case on national service -- who's left to complain? As ever, the slipperiest slopes are greased with the snake oil of 'bipartisanship.'

After all, Obama's hardly alone. Sen. John McCain is a passionate supporter of Washington-led (and paid-for) 'volunteerism,' as is President Bush. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and John Edwards both campaigned for the presidency on compulsory national service.

Perhaps thanks to the JFK cult, which sees the refrain 'Ask not what your country can do for you ...' as an all-purpose writ for social meddling, even the idealistic hipster crowd is on board. Devotees of Rolling Stone and MTV, who normally preen like cats in a pool of sunshine over their alleged libertarianism when the issue is sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, see nothing wrong, and everything right, with involuntary servitude -- as long as we just call it 'voluntary.'

Volunteerism is good. But why does every good thing need to be orchestrated by government? Most people think that churchgoing is a good thing. Does that mean the government should fund churches? That's what they do in Europe and -- surprise! -- most pews sit empty.

Americans are vastly more generous with their time and their money than Europeans. According to social demographer Arthur C. Brooks, in 1995 (the last year international comparative data on giving was available), Americans gave 3 1/2 times as much money to charities and causes as the French, seven times more than the Germans and 14 times more than the Italians.

In 1998, Americans also volunteered 21% more than the Swiss and 32% more than Germans -- two countries with compulsory national service. And yet we're continually told we should emulate them so that America too can have a "culture of service."

But we already have a healthier culture of service without -- as Obama would do -- doubling the size of the Peace Corps or pushing another 250,000 into AmeriCorps.

Indeed, there's ample evidence that countries with intrusive and expensive welfare states stifle their citizens' spirit of charity and volunteerism precisely because people conclude that every problem should be solved by government. Merely paying your taxes substitutes for charity, and cleaning up roadside litter for two years absolves you from doing anything more.

Time magazine's Richard Stengel speaks for many who insist that American government must consecrate everything. 'The reason private volunteerism is so high is precisely that confidence in our public institutions is so low,' he wrote last year in praise of universal national service. 'People see volunteering not as a form of public service but as an antidote for it.'

Really? I would have thought that the world's most charitable and voluntaristic nation -- one with a tradition of service that predates the decline of confidence in public institutions by generations -- might see volunteering as a good in and of itself.

This is the real problem with national service mania: It seeks to fix what ain't broke. No, national service isn't slavery. But it contributes to a slave mentality, at odds with American tradition. It assumes that work not done for the government isn't really for the 'common good.'

'The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,' Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed. 'The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.'

Moynihan was right, of course. But politics can change a culture for the worse too. Indoctrinating an entire generation with the idea that public service is something you do at the government's behest would not only steamroll the culture, it would help fewer people in the process."

He's right, of course. And from the Sentator's quotation, I never thought I'd find myself squarely to the right of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but I have to say that, generally, the conservative truth he cites is true and the liberal truth, at best, offers a short term answer when people are not being their brothers' keeper as well as is needed.

The idea that people and culture should be largely responsible for such matters is one that challenges many old-school liberals and conservatives, I am well aware. But it is a sign of a stronger culture and a stronger commitment to public and private good, not a sign of the apocalypse, left or right.

It'd be nice if American political leaders, as much as the American people, would step up in their commitment to that stronger vision of America and the world.

Until then, it's hardly worthy of us to pretend like our current efforts are really doing the job.

The food crisis and the law of unintended consquences

The New Republic, for the first time in a very long time, has a column worth citing, by Suzie Khimm.

How to feed the hungriest

"One real solution, as others have discussed, is agricultural development: getting seed, fertilizer, and machinery to farmers, and getting roads built so that these countries can feed themselves. This week, the World Bank announced that it would nearly doubled the money lent to such efforts in Africa, and Bank president Robert Zoellick has asked the G8 leaders convening next week to make similar pledges.

Unfortunately, it will be more difficult to muster the political will to look beyond short-term handouts and boost long-term rural development in starving nations. In this country, there’s the absurd boondoggle of the American food aid system, which demands that food be sourced in the U.S. and shipped on American vessels--a concession to powerful U.S. agribusiness and maritime interests. If food aid were sourced locally and regionally instead, it would create a big market incentive for agricultural development, ultimately alleviating the problem, or at least substantially diminishing its severity.

More broadly speaking, we also need to overcome the lingering paternalism that still colors our ideas about how to help the world’s hungriest--an attitude that assumes that the way to feed the wide-eyed children on television is by paying for their dinner tomorrow. There’s no doubt that emergency food aid is vitally necessary in the midst of the current crisis, and initiatives like the World Food Program have made aid efforts more sustainable. But the impact of America’s altruism would be many times greater if it were also directed to support less glamorous, screen-ready causes--such as, say, fertilizer.

The catch is that programs like international agricultural development are usually funded by governments, rather than private donors, and Americans continue to prefer voluntary private giving over mandatory public contributions. But the appeal to reconsider our conception of charity has to start somewhere. Give a man a fish, anyone?"

Khimm writes earlier in the article:

"For sure, the rural poor aren’t immune to the fluctuations of the international market: the upsurge in prices is destabilizing their countries’ economies, hampering government assistance programs, and hobbling international food aid efforts. (America’s food donations have been halved due to rising costs.)"

That is undoubtedly true, of course. But does it occur to anyone that, given the American and most peoples' penchant for voluntary private giving rather than mandatory public contributions, perhaps drops in food donations have also been due, as with the economic downturn) to a more repressive economic enviroment (moderately more trade protectionism, increased domestic regulation, a substantially increased Federal deficit and spending, increased and more public prosecutions of business owners and executives, the more frequent and pronounced use of public pressure to influence business activity and public policy, etc.)? Probably not, since everyone is going hog-wild with an approach that has produced so many poor results. What's one more, dumbasses must ask themselves?

Khimm is right about the bigger picture of international aid efforts (and similar reasoning warrants a transition to voluntary commitments in domestic welfare efforts, as well, in America and elsewhere). In fact, what she is articulating about powerful domestic industries using government power to further their own interests in such efforts is exactly one of the more serious concerns that Milton Friedman had of government-led market intervetion efforts. And it is pretty clear to me that the same self-centered manipulations is true of politicians, activists, and of all political actors (and all people, really) of all ideological and other stripes, until the consequences of such activity makes clear the failure of such manipulation.

As one Israeli diplomat described the origins of the nation of Israel, sometimes governments do all the wrong things before they hit upon the right thing. The same could be said of people, generally, really.

And the food crisis is but one more example in the long line of how even the most worthy causes are subject to the law that governs all humanity: the law of unintended consquences.

Maybe we should step back from the brink and reevaluate. If we want to do any good, that is.

"We need to finish the job"

This is exactly how I feel. And I am more and more ambivalent to who does it the more I have to watch this mindless election spectacle.



American politicians, in their mad and random grabs for power, have a way of producing apathy and cynicism, I must say.

And these folks serve as a valuable antidote to all that bullshit.

It's nice to have something worth believing in this Presidential election.

It's Fox News, bitch

I've never understood why so many liberals took Fox News so seriously as a threat to American democracy. It's like taking American Idol or the New Kids on the Block seriously as a threat to democracy. Ratings matter most to those who could give a shit about their credibility. Fox News, like professional wrestling, has more important things to think about than how popular they are.

And the Daily Show's John Oliver makes the powerful argument for why Fox News has defied the elites to demonstrate that popularity and journalistic integrity make for a big can of political whoopass.



Hot damn. Feel the integrity.



How does Fox News do it? Because they're just better than you. And tougher. And show a lot more cleavage.

At some point, someone's going to have to give Fox their props and carve out another spot on Mount Rushmore for Roger Ailes.

For now, Fox has an audience of millions. And, if you laught at that, elitist, just ask Britney Spears how much a million is. She'll show you how counting and popularity compensate for being a laughing stock.

It's Fox News, bitch.



It's her perogative.

Stepping back for the big picture

I have to say that I very much admire the efforts of General David Petraeus in his capacity as Commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq. He is one of the more thoughtful people to have at that command and one of the best prepared, intellectually, to handle that job.



There is a part of me that envies his willingness and capacity to focus on the smaller picture of achieving success, in the form of sustainable Iraqi-led security amidst the violence that plagues that situation, before stepping back for the big picture.

I am a consonant big picture thinker. It is my biggest strength, I think. It is also a tendency that has got me in much trouble, often.

I am not someone who easily walks away from a situation and says, "It's not my problem," or "It's not my job." It's just not in me. In no job or responsibility I have had in a very long time have I ever been able to shirk an ultimate sense of responsibility. I have watched many friends and colleagues do it. I have had many bosses who do it. The vast majority, by far, in both categories. I have watched many politicians, journalists, academics, activists and various public servants and observers do it. Probably the vast majority in that category, as well, in the bigger picture.

But I've just never been able or willing to think that way. I take responsibility for all of the most serious responsibilities that we and I face very, very seriously. I just don't think I'm seriously capable of anything else in my life, at this point.

Maybe that's a mistake. It's definitely unconventional, I know. But I do think we'd be better off if more people reasoned and thought like this rather than less.

In the last 3-6 years of my life, for the first time in my life, I've started to pull back, some, in my heart. At least, I've been more unsure of this commitment than at any point in my life.

The world has just gotten meaner in that time. We've rationalized our worst instincts. And, worst of all, some have had the audacity to call it "progressive."

But progress can't happen when we rationalize our worst instincts.

Progress is only what happens when we embrace our best instincts, and take responsibility for our worst instincts.

Everything else is bullshit and a lie. And it doesn't matter how many times we tell a lie. It never becomes true with repetition.

Hitler had to learn that lesson the hard way. Stalin did as well. Every most power-obsessed leader and follower in the world has had to learn that difficult and destructive lesson the hard way.

Castro believes he has escaped that lie. As does Kim Jong Il. As does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As does Hu Jintao. As does Robert Mugabe. As does Myanmar's military leader Senior General Than Shwe. As does Sudanese President Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir. As does Ismail Haniyeh. As does Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. As does every dictator, terrorist, and thug who has ever walked the earth.

None of them have. None of them will.

Progress is not something we can thugishly impose on one another. Progress, as David Petraeus' career illustrates, is something that can only occur patiently, honestly, and with more decency and good will, over time.

Many have tried to define progress as the retreat of those who they engage in political warfare with and their ability to win ground for their causes, by hard or soft means, as Joseph Nye might put what he says now of soft power, in my correspondence with him, as not a more liberal commitment to the use of power - a commitment more consistent with our liberal and democratic values - but merely a social scientific term for less aggressive forms of manipulation and power.

But this is not only a dishonest view of progress and policy, a view that could fit the objectives of groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Nazis, and the Communists, as much as genuinely liberal and democratic progressive forces. It is a foolish notion of power and politics, which assumes that retreats signal final losses that they do not, in fact, signify.

Progress happens despite such setbacks, always, to anyone doing an honest reading of liberal democratic history. And no effort to rationalize such setbacks as actual progress have either made them so or convinced the vast majorities of liberal democratic peoples that they are, in fact, so, over the long term.

If you doubt that, I suggest you spend a small portion of your time studying Nazi or Soviet history, both of which were premised upon ideologies of progress, both of which convinced many people that such a premise was true, and both of which failed to stand the test of time that a more honest accounting would provide, over time.

Sometimes I wish I could just focus on the small picture, so that I could avoid the trouble that challenging sacrosanct notions of the big picture often creates for me. It would make my life easier, perhaps.

But it wouldn't be honest. And what I have to offer is too important to pull back from it, now, I think.

But it would nice. To just be a normal person who takes what life gives me, more, rather than someone wanting so much more from life.

This must have been how Hobbes felt. He was just trying to develop an idea of governance that would transcend the chaos created by power-hungry partisans that plagued his time. That is my same concern.

Though, knowing how few people actually know who Thomas Hobbes or Baron de Montesquieu or John Locke or even John Stuart Mill is, it is tempting to want to abandon it all and pursue something a little more lucrative and popular and less challenging and controversial.

But without challenge and controversy, and all of the serious disincentives to this work, there never can be real progress.

Everything else is a lie, at worst, and a half-truth, at best.

I want something better. For my kids and future generations. And for me.

And that is worth stepping back for.

Joseph Merrick, and what strength and courage looks like

If you have not seen The Elephant Man, before, I highly recommend it. It's David Lynch's and John Hurt's strongest film, I think.

I'm watching it, right now. It's the first movie I remember really making me sob as a kid. It's a very beautiful film.

"I am not an animal! I am a human being! I...am...a man!"

I cry harder, today, than I did then. It's a good sign for my humanity, I think.

Jospeh Merrick, referred to as John, in the movie and by others, because of a mistake in the book by Sir Frederick Treves, is what true strength, courage and dignity look like. I can't imagine living through the numerous cruelties and indignities he experienced and maintaining his gentleness of spirit.

It's more strength than I have ever known, that is for sure.

Too often humanity confuses cruelty, aggression, and power with strength. At times aggression and power are needed. But their abuse and use when they cause unnecessary hurt and tragedy is cruelty. Their rationalization, as Lord Acton wisely observed, has been the bane of human civilization. And the cruelty that is the fact of their abuse is one quality of the human condition that needs no excuse. As someone who has known and been responsible for cruelty, as much as aggression and power, I can say that with confidence.

Joseph Merrick reminds us what genuine strength and dignity really look like.



As John Hurt says in the special features, "Well, I would say that if you can manage to get to the end of The Elephant Man without being moved, I don't think that you'd be someone I'd want to know."

I'd want to know you. But I'm not sure I could respect anyone who took that attitude.

John Merrick took his life. It is an unfortunate tragedy for me. I wish I could say that I would have more strength in the face of the challenges he faced. I hope I would. But the strength it took him to face a life of such unparalleled cruelty and infringements on his dignity is ultimately unknowable to me.

Joseph Merrick's autobiography ends with this poem by Isaac Watts.

Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul,
The mind's the standard of the man.

I am blessed for having known something of him.

Our inadequacies and mine

I just had an email exchange, in the last few days, with one of my oldest and best friends, about Jesse Helms.

My friend and I were college roommates, student and coach on our college debate team (Carson was the strongest debate coach I ever had, by far), fellowtraveling liberals, and good friends.

We both came from a ideological background of young liberals who had, generally, grown up hating Jesse Helms for his unfailing bigotry, intolerance, and mean-spiritedness. Amongst liberals, Jesse Helms was everything that fueled liberal self-righteousness. He was everything that liberals hated amongst what they thought was common to conservatives, without them acknowledging it. He was stupid, base, narrow-minded, and nasty. And his polarizing attitudes and politics earned him the derision of liberals. And I was writing a friend who could share in my revulsion for this man and his legacy.

I still believe those things are true. Jesse got better by the end. He embraced more compassion with his advocacy of tripling the American foreign aid budget for addressing the crisis of AIDS in Africa. He never apologized publicly, that I heard, or took any real responsibility for his racism and homophobia. But he did move away from his racism, at least, hiring none other than James Meredith, the first black student accepted to the University of Mississippi, and I hope his repulsion for homosexuality and homosexuals. And he showed real compassion for the millions suffering with AIDS, disease, and poverty in Africa and much of the world.

More importantly, Jesse had many good qualities, all along, that liberals, like me, overlooked in their own revulsion for his hateful and small-minded attitudes.

Jesse Helms took American freedom, sovereignty and his opposition to the totalitarian Soviet dictatorship seriously. His advocacy of the cause of Soviet dissident, Miroslav Medvid, who was disgracefully returned to Soviet hands by President Ronald Reagan days before a American-Soviet summit, helped make far less likely that Medvid would face KGB retribution. Helms was a public and needed critic of the United Nations, both of its flaws and of real and potential incursions on American sovereignty and self-determination.

Helms took many stands that I agree with, today, generally for reasons very different than the Senator. I share his concerns about forced busing and forms of integration that attempted to force racist whites in the South, and racist blacks, for that matter, to overcome their racism, a task that force could not possibly accomplish. I also share his skepticism of government taking on unsustainable commitments to the welfare of Americans and people around the world that I think are better and would be more generously funded by private and voluntary donors, long term.

Whereas Jesse Helms often seemed to oppose such measures out of sympathy with the racism and small-heartedness of too many of his fellow North Carolinans and Americans, sentiments that, his apologists' protestations to the contrary, I believe he often shared, I oppose such measures based on what I think is a more realistic assessment of what people are and will be willing to do in changing attitudes in more compassionate and generous directions, to genuinely look out for the interests of their fellow Americans and human beings, in the most sustainable way possible, voluntarily and of their own free will, and to do so in the most honest, proactive, diverse, caring, generous, successful, and responsible ways possible.

So Jesse and I differ in some pretty substantial ways. Where much of Jesse's worldview was animated by his bitterness, pettiness, and opposition to those many things in the world he hated, I am primarily driven by my love for humanity and others and my genuine concern for their welfare and policies most likely to care for their welfare. I do think that is the most real difference between Jesse Helms and, I hope, many of his fellow Americans and citizens of the world, and much of the reason why I was offended by the authority he wielded in one of the most powerful representative bodies in the world.

Having said all that, I saw something else, these past few days.

I saw one of the clearest examples of the aphorism that I have worked to live by in my life probably more than any other.

It was an aphorism by a common hero of Jesse Helms' and mine. It was a great man who lived thousands of years ago who was persecuted and murdered for his commitment to his fellow men and women. And he had one of the most astute and powerful observations of the human condition of any I have known.

Jesus of Nazareth, in the years previous to 26-36 A.D./C.E., made what I regard as one of the most notable comments on the human condition of any I have ever heard. There are many variations on it. But the essence, as found in the King James biblical version, is this:

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

I've always said that Jesus' question was better aphorism than approbation. It's a better straightfoward observation of human nature than something to chastise our fellow human beings with. And I very much doubt that Jesus meant it as a chastisement, given that a genuine commitment to not passing judgment was a fundamental commitment of his life and teachings.

I am a soft atheist (I attend the Christian church I attended as a child, Unity Church, and find more in common with Christian believers than I find difference) and was a Christian youth leader as a young man. I am a spiritual ecumenical and a political indepenent, today. I am atheist as a technical matter; I don't believe there is enough evidence to warrant the existence of a supernatural being that runs the affairs of humanity. I have no particular stake in the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth as messiah, as the son of God, as a great leader, as a great man, or anything of the kind.

I just believe that he was a great man. And that this teaching he had to offer, along with his commitment to love, compassion, forgiveness and other central virtues of the human condition, are some of the most important and too often denigrated virtues that humanity has to offer.

It is a central commitment of my life to treat others as I would want to be treated. To love others as I would want to be loved.

And I realized over the course of the last few days that this has been a serious failing of mine, a beam that has sat in my eye for most of my life, while I concentrated on the splinters in the eye of Senator Helms.

Jesse Helms had ugliness to be repulsed by, that is for sure.

But that is the whole point of Jesus' teaching.

The bitterness, pettiness, and ugliness of others does not justify our own.

And I have been justifying my own bitterness, pettiness, and ugliness toward Jesse Helms my whole life in the name of pointing to the same in Jesse.

I am embarrassed by this blindspot. Not because I haven't experienced it before. I have experienced it a million times, before, of course. I am embarrassed because it was the very same blindspot that I so abhorred in Jesse as a young man.



And the truth was that I was being harsh with Jesse in the very same way that I felt he was harsh with the world.

And I am embarrassed that it took Jesse's death for me to see that.



It's one of the wisest observations about human nature that I have ever known:

We are more likely to see see the splinter in our neighbor's eye than the beam in our own. We are more likely to see the faults in others than the faults in ourselves. And we are likely to use others' shortcomings to rationalize our own. It is one of the wisest observations about politics, nevertheless people. And it is true of me as much as anyone else.

I'm sorry, Jesse. I'm sorry all I could see was your faults and not my own frailties. And, worse, that I used your weakneses to excuse my own.

Godspeed, Senator Helms. Rest in peace, Jesse.

What it means to be an American

Red Skelton reminds us what it means to be an American.



And Michelle Malkin, with whom I generally find more diagreement than agreement, posts this really beautiful video of Ray Charles' God Bless America.



Red gets to the heart of it, I think. To be an American means to be pledged to one anothers' freedom. Not to power over one another or even power over other nations.

It means to be pledged to freedom. Mine and yours. For all of us.

It'll be nice to live in an America, some day, where that is more true than not.

The Final Say

As Gawker put it, the final word in any argument.



You gotta admit. It's pretty goddamn cute. And disgusting.

Leveraging free speech

Geert Wilders has opened up a shitstorm. And good for him.



This is one of the more serious places where the glorification of pressure and leverage is going to break down. As Muslim and Arab "moderates" try to leverage the most cherished freedoms in liberal democracies, namely, in this case, the freedom of speech. The inside/outside game of so many radicals and collaborating moderates, here and abroad, is a fascinating, dishonest, and ugly spectacle, let me tell you. I'd admire it's cleverness more if so many people didn't get manipulated, hurt, and killed in its name. It is the rationale for radical Islam and its associated terrorism, after all. It's the rationale of every bully with too weak of arguments to persuade others of their better reasoning.

Jordan's Legal Jihad

As Stephen Brown from my favorite far right publication (I think sarcasm just literally dripped from my keyboard), Frontpage Magazine, writes:

"In a brazen attempt to stifle free speech in the West, a Jordanian court recently summoned twelve European citizens to answer criminal charges of blasphemy and inciting hatred.

Among those sought by the court is Geert Wilders, the Dutch liberal politician who made the anti-Islamist film, Fitna. Released last March, the Dutch MP’s production caused an uproar in Islamic countries, since it equated Islam with violence. Now a Middle Eastern court would like to prosecute Wilders for the 'crime.' (Ironically, a Dutch court dropped charges against him for inciting hatred against Muslims with his film the day before the Jordanian court issued its subpoena.)

The Jordanian court’s move is only the most ambitious attempt to silence debate about Islam. Until now, the preferred strategy has been to file civil lawsuits in western courts to intimidate critics. The latest version of what may be called the legal jihad is even more disturbing.

In one subpoena, issued in early June, the Jordanian court ordered ten Danish newspaper editors to travel to Jordan for the 'crime' of having republished the “Mohammad cartoons” last February. The cartoons, first published in 2005, were also greeted with disturbances in Muslim lands. Seventeen Danish newspapers republished the controversial cartoons as a response to the discovery of an Islamist plot to murder Kurt Westergaard. Westergaard, a caricaturist, drew the most famous of those cartoons in the form of Mohammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban, for which he is also included in the summons.

This new campaign of intimidation against the West is being mounted by a Jordanian organization calling itself 'Messenger of Allah Unite Us', which is made up of '...media outlets, professional associations, parliamentarians and thousands of volunteers.' This organization, according to one account, arose as a 'civilized response' to the Mohammad cartoons’ republication in 17 Danish papers last winter, after which it took the matter to a Jordanian court and successfully had charges pressed against the Danes, and later against Wilders...

Citizens of western countries who criticize Islam, and are even willing to face lawsuits in civil courts their own countries for doing so, may now exercise restraint if they risk facing criminal charges in a Muslim country. Especially if the charge is blasphemy and it is being tried by a sharia court, which can impose a death sentence (The Danes and Wilders, a Jordanian lawyer said, are facing a maximum of three years in jail).

As well, critics of Islam who have outstanding warrants against them from courts in Muslim countries will have their freedom of movement restricted, since travel abroad will now be problematic. Wilders expressed this sentiment, saying he will be careful when he travels now. Such targeted individuals, like Wilders, will obviously have reservations travelling to a third country where Jordan could file an extradition application or may already have an extradition treaty in place.

But what is most disturbing is that an Islamic country would dare subpoena citizens of another state for an action not committed within its borders but in a land where no laws were broken. Besides being meant as a weapon of intimidation, this tactic also represents a frightening extension of Islamic law into the heart of western countries.

But perhaps most ominously, this incredibly brazen measure shows that even a small Islamic country like Jordan has no fear of Europe. And, indeed, no retaliatory response met the Jordanian court’s action against European citizens.

Europe’s appeasement is also evident in the second part of Messenger For Allah group’s anti-blasphemy campaign. This part calls for a commercial boycott of all Danish and Dutch products in Jordan and of anything associated with the two countries, such as airlines and shipping companies. The boycott campaign actually began late last February but was suspended due to the losses Jordanian importers were incurring that had large stocks of unsold Danish and Dutch products.

The boycott, however, was resumed June 10. One million posters containing the logos of banned Dutch and Danish products will eventually hang in Jordanian businesses under the title 'Living Without It.' The boycott will also be spread by television and radio ads, t-shirts, and bumper stickers.

Dutch and Danish companies were instructed they could get their products off the boycott list if they, essentially, betrayed their nations’ values and their countrymen. The affected companies, according to The Jordan Times, were told to denounce the Dutch film and the Danish cartoons in the media both in Jordan and in at least one publication in their own country, support the Jordanian legal action taken against Wilders and the Danish newspaper people as well as the creation of an international anti-blasphemy law.

Several companies have already complied. When informed of the stipulation that requires a denunciation be published in a Dutch newspaper, a spokesman for a Dutch food company that exports to Jordan said his company '…would print it if needed.'

But such groveling will only buy these companies a little time, as another Dutch company discovered. It had immediately distanced itself from Wilders and Fitna after the film’s release last March but still had products placed on the boycott posters.

The Dutch government did not fare much better in its appeasement efforts. One Dutch embassy official in Jordan said he was surprised his country was included in the boycott in the first place since his government had already printed statements in the Jordanian press distancing itself from Wilders’ film.

And, naturally, the Jordanian blackmailers’ demands have not stopped. Only last week, Dutch and Danish companies were told to put the boycott posters up in their own countries if they did not want their products blacklisted.

Perhaps to further intimidate Holland’s and Denmark’s populations, the Jordanians are also claiming their boycott campaign is causing these countries huge financial losses of over four billion Euros in four months. A Danish official, however, says that is ridiculous since his country only exported about $50 million worth of goods to Jordan in 2007.

The overall goal of the Messenger of Allah group’s legal and commercial campaign against the two European states, it says, is the enactment of 'a universal law that prohibits the defamation of any prophet or religion', especially of the Prophet Mohammad. Islamic countries are already pushing for such a law at the United Nations.

'The boycott is a means but not an end,' said Zakaria Sheikh, a spokesperson for Messenger of Allah Unite Us. 'We are not aiming at collective punishment, but when the Danish and Dutch people put pressure on their governments to support the creation of an international law, we are achieving our goal.'"

This is what is at stake, for those who romanticize pressure and repression as a governing philosophy.

The beauty is that it undermines itself, long term. Hence the passionate defense of principles like free speech in liberal democratic countries (those who advocate pressure and repression have to wonder, how, exactly, did repression of free speech for thousands of years fall apart if pressure and repression work so well? The answer is that brave people like Voltaire, the Baron de Montequieu, and the like happened, made stronger arguments, and inspired generations to embrace a liberty that had, till that point, been regularly abrogated).

Embracing and defending freedom and liberal values, as the British on-line video website, Liveleak, does in its airing of videos that openly debate this matter, is exactly what best embodies those liberal values.

Those values and the free speech that people like Voltaire and Montesquieu, Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, and all of our liberal forefunners risked their lives and their liberty to guarantee for us, today, mean that films like Fitna, the Geert Wilders' movie that has attracted so much attention and derision, Wilders' critics, and all of those who enter the marketplace of ideas should have the freedom to air their views.



What is at stake is, "Are we going to look more like the radical Islamists, the Zimbabwe government, the North Korea's Communist leadership, and other repressive forces we are rightly opposed to? Or are we going to look more like Americans and embrace the freedoms we say we love."



During this political period, liberal democracies have chosen a direction closer to radical Islam and repression as a governing philosophy. This article makes clear what a dangerous trend that could be.

I hope, for our sake, we choose freedom. Because freedom is why I love America and the Western world, not something to fear.



Fearing freedom should be left to radical Islam.

The rest of us have an honest democracy to tend to.

"A proper debate"

The Economist gets at exactly the most pressing problem in the current race.

America at its best

"For what America's voters, and the world's fascinated spectators, have not had so far is much of a policy debate. Yes, there were bone-aching arguments between Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton as to whose plan for health care would work best. And yes, Mr Obama refused to endorse Mrs Clinton's bad plan for a gas-tax holiday. But on the whole, it has been a policy-light contest for the simple reason that there was very little to choose between the two Democrats either on domestic or on foreign policy. Small wonder, then, that the Democratic race focused on character more than content.

All that has now changed. With his victory speech in Minneapolis on June 3rd, Mr Obama took the fight to Mr McCain. Though there are a fair number of things on which Mr Obama and Mr McCain, admirably, agree (a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, the immediate closure of Guantánamo and a more multilateral approach to diplomacy, to name just three), there is a lot more that they disagree over.

The choice will be starkest over Iraq. Mr McCain backed the war in the first place, and he proposes to stay the course there no matter how long it takes. Mr Obama opposed the “dumb” war from the start and has pledged to withdraw all combat troops within 16 months, though he has lately wriggled a little on this commitment. Although most Americans now think the war was a mistake, polls suggest that Mr McCain's determination to see it through may stand him in better stead with voters than Mr Obama's determination to pull out whatever the consequences, especially since the tide of war seems at last to have shifted firmly in America's favour. In general, Mr McCain will offer a much more robust approach to security issues than Mr Obama—and that may help him.

That said, the war is clearly receding as a political issue, just as concerns about recession are growing. America no longer has a Hummer economy (General Motors is considering selling off the gas guzzler). And there are clear choices about how to fix it. Mr McCain offers orthodox supply-side solutions, stressing deregulation, free trade, competitiveness and the use of market mechanisms to cure the problems in everything from health care to education to pensions. The trouble for him is that America is already a pretty deregulated place, and many voters feel that globalisation has brought them much less than was promised (and bankers a lot more). Mr Obama offers a very different vision: more spending on education and training, an expensive expansion of health care to (almost) all Americans and better benefits for the unemployed. His problem will be convincing sceptics that his sums add up, though it may well be that voters, battered by falling house prices and rising oil prices prefer not to worry too much about that.

Both candidates have their flaws and their admirable points; the doughty but sometimes cranky old warrior makes a fine contrast with the inspirational but sometimes vaporous young visionary. Voters now have those five months to study them before making up their minds (and The Economist will be doing the same). But, on the face of it, this is the most impressive choice America has had for a very long time."

I'm not, at all, convinced that these two candidates are the most impressive choices America has had for a very long time. Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, among others, are tough competition for strong Presidential leadership. Plenty of candidates who didn't win their parties' nominations or general elections, like Bobby Kennedy and Barry Goldwater, to name just two, who were fairly impressive choices in the rear view of history.

But these two candidates were the strongest two choices, I thought at the beginning of this race, if only for the most important fact of politics: they were the two most likely to have an honest and open-ended policy debate and discussion. Every other candidate Democrats and Republicans had to offer were either too power-obsessed, one of the most serious problems for political leaders and observers to bring to the table in a liberal democracy, or too full of sanctimony and self-righteousness to be genuinely capable of an honest, open-ended, pragmatic policy discussion. When your whole modus operandi in politics and in life is to prove how right you are all the time and never be open to your mistakes or failures, you are no use to anyone, not even to your own ego. Because you have become incapable of learning from your own mistakes and not just the mistakes of others. And far too many in both packs, in 2008, suffered this folly.

The strength that these two candidates bring, amidst this power-obsessed and all-too-mindless electoral season, is a more honest and open-minded and open-hearted commitment to the welfare of their fellow citizens than any of their competitors.

Now the question is: will they put those open minds and hearts to good use and have an honest debate?

And it is the candidates, and not the various advocates, who will have to bring leadership on this question. And the candidate who can both bring better policy ideas - John McCain, on balance, at least in regards to the war in Iraq, the economy, and health care, to my mind, at this point; Barack Obama's better proposals around diplomacy are an important strength that weigh heavily in my mind to his advantage - and greater leadership to the matter of engaging an honest and sober debate and discussion and bucking the pressure from all quarters to engage more dishonestly, with strong-arming rather than debate, will win my vote.

If both candidates cave to the pressure from both their own wings and various circles that they must work with on critical issues, especially the war and matters of international security and diplomacy, we will all be the poorer for it. And not least because Presidential candidates caving to pressure is hardly leadership. Leadership is having a strong and largely accurate vision and being willing to tell activists to go to hell as you make the really important calls. Candidates who do what they are told are not leaders. They are puppets.

And America is worthy of more than puppets to run her government. She deserves leadership.

A proper debate is a good first step.